FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT MOURNERS - PAGE 5

Kenya Jackson didn't want the mourners at her daughter's funeral to pity her. She didn't want them to cry for her daughter either. With quiet fortitude, the mother of 17-year-old Kiyanna Salter stared into the eyes of hundreds of mourners and pleaded with them to honor the teen by doing something more important: loving their own children. "It's going to happen again," said Jackson, her voice heavy with sorrow. "Y'all gotta love these kids. Talk to them. Be understanding." Salter was killed Oct. 5 on a CTA bus as she was returning home from visiting a sick aunt when two men got into a quarrel over a passing touch and one fired a gun into the bus, striking Salter.

When Mersaides McCauley was at church, she couldn't stop dancing. Whether she was in the congregation or on stage with the choir, the 22-year-old was always smiling and always moving, friends said. "She loved to dance; she was one of the most energetic people in choir," said her friend and fellow choir member Shauna Haynes, 29. "This was her getaway." McCauley's funeral Friday at the Family Christian Center in Munster, Ind., reflected that mixture of faith and enthusiasm, even as family and friends grieved over her slaying.

In another time, there assuredly would have been flower cars and many more mourners. Maybe even a wiseguy like Sam DeStefano, who delighted in making faces at the detectives riding right on his tail to the cemetery. Pallbearers from among the deceased's friends could be expected to smile, even wave to the photographers, not turn away or slink off. And those from public life, the glamor people of show business, politics and even organized labor and the sport of boxing, they would be there, some of them signing autographs for the curious gathered behind the sweeping driveway of Chicago's Montclair-Lucania Funeral Home to see "a real somebody" get a grand sendoff.

More than 1,000 mourners filled a heavily guarded cathedral Saturday to pray and weep over a Roman Catholic bishop who killed himself to protest religious discrimination in Pakistan. Mourners, mainly from poor local Christian communities, crowded around the body of Bishop John Joseph at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Violence broke out Friday when mourners brought his body to Faisalabad. The city was calm Saturday. The funeral is Sunday. Joseph, 66, a human-rights campaigner, shot himself in the head Wednesday to protest the country's blasphemy law. He had argued it led to discrimination against Christians and other minorities.

Everything was in place for the funeral. The casket was set up in the parlor, chairs in the sitting room awaited those who came to grieve, the funeral cakes were sitting on the dining room table. And Wayne Hill was the picture of 1890s mourning, dressed in black, right down to the black zinnia in his lapel. A black zinnia? "I spray-painted it," he said. That tip of his top hat to aerosol advancement aside, Hill, a naturalist for the DuPage County Forest Preserve District, was leading a Kline Creek Farm program that explained funeral practices in the area in the 1890s.

When it was finally done, this grim, gruesome and horrible round, Nick Faldo emerged from the scorer's tent behind the 18th green and spotted 15 or so of the media, all but one English. No inquisitors this day. Mourners. Eyes were averted, as mourners avert their eyes. Voices were soft, as mourners soften their voices. The tone was sympathetic, as mourners try so hard to find. A mere three years ago, Nick Faldo won his third Masters. Nick Faldo was atop the golf world. Now, Nick Faldo's golf game is dead as he has slid down that horrible golf abyss that Australian Ian Baker-Finch and Britain's Sandy Lyle had slid down in the last decade, landing at true bottom.

An illegal volley of shots fired at the end of a graveside funeral service in the Albany Park neighborhood Tuesday afternoon sounded a distinctly sour note for mourners, who were arrested on weapons charges. Mourners in Montrose Cemetery, 5400 N. Pulaski Rd., fired a round of shots over the grave of a young man killed in an automobile accident last week, according to Capt. Clarence Zanders, watch commander of the Albany Park District Police. The mourners told police that their actions were customary at Assyrian funerals.

More than 1,000 mourners packed a resort lodge and overflowed from two tents Saturday for the funeral of slain University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin, who was remembered for her generous heart and infectious spirit. The lodge was one of the few places in northern Minnesota large enough to hold such a crowd. The body of Sjodin, 22, who grew up in nearby Pequot Lakes, was found April 17, five months after she disappeared from a Grand Forks, N.D., shopping mall parking lot. Rev. Mark Anderson told mourners that the community had moved from shock to anger to fear.

Hundreds of mourners packed a church Saturday to remember 11 family members, including eight children, who were killed in a fire March 10. The family was using candles for light because they had just moved into a second-floor apartment where the electricity had not yet been activated. One ignited a mattress, officials said. A family member tried to push the mattress downstairs and out, but the front door was locked and blocked by boxes. State Rep. Derrick Shepherd told about 300 mourners that "this tragedy has brought the metropolitan city of New Orleans closer together."